The Dish

London, 7.15 am.

[Clive]

Many thanks to Andrew for letting me sit in his chair for the next couple of weeks. I feel like a tourist let loose on the bridge of an aircraft-carrier.  Now, er, what does this button marked "Atomic" do…?  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on an introduction, but I just want to confirm that I’m not Clive Davis the record executive. He has much more money than I, although he’s also a lot older.  So please don’t send me any more offers of demo tapes – I get enough of those at my blog. (My fault for not putting my picture on the masthead.) Bribes will be accepted, though, as my accountant really needs cheering up.

I’ve been blogging for a couple of years, but this is the first time I’ve ever been part of a group effort. It should be fun. Apologies in advance for any technical glitches. Spelling my own name on a keyboard is usually a big enough challenge for me.

[Clive]

Those dumb Yanks can barely find Britain on the map… How many times have I heard snide comments like that since 9/11? Well, if the latest score in an online transatlantic quiz is any guide, the two countries are more tightly matched than the cynics might imagine:

The 2006 Geography Cup, a collaboration between a geography campaigner from Atlanta and a teacher from Oxfordshire, allows contestants two minutes to place 10 randomly selected countries on an interactive map, and answer three topical questions. Most people are flummoxed by the Pacific Island states, such as Tuvalu, and the Caribbean Islands. They are also a little hazy about the location of countries in Africa. And that is true for players on both sides of the Atlantic.

"It really is neck and neck," said Daniel Raven-Ellison, who teaches geography at a school in Woodcote, south Oxfordshire. "A lot of Brits take the mick out of Americans for not having knowledge about geography, but this might take people aback."

You can register for the test here. I tried to sign in just now, but the computer at the other end wouldn’t let me, because it seems to think I don’t live in the UK.  Ah, well…

UPDATE: Some American readers are having trouble logging in, too. So is someone from New Jersey. Sorry, DRK – cheap shot. I have good friends in Jersey as a matter of fact. Honest.

[Clive]

I’m one of those people who’s always assumed that intervention in Darfur is a moral duty. But then, a lot of us felt the same way about Iraq, so Christopher Caldwell’s warning against the military option will be pinned over my desk for the next couple of days: "Darfur is a problem the west should touch only with a very long stick." His FT column is subscriber-only, sadly, but here’s the gist:

… The pictures being evoked in western minds are oversimplifications. Darfur is not just sadists on one hand and victims on the other. It is a war. We have only the vaguest picture of what kind of war it is. Is it a race war pitting the Arabs of Khartoum against the blacks of Darfur? Is it a civil war over money and natural resources? (The rebels, too, have looted aid convoys and clashed with African Union peacekeepers.) Is Khartoum running a classic, Guatemalan-style, dry-up-the-fishpond counter-insurgency? Or is this just one front in a brewing east Africa-wide war of Islamist expansion….?

Which of these wars do we think we are joining? On whose side? The aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein shows this question to be nearly unanswerable… The decision about which war to fight would be taken out of our hands the moment troops started landing. The number of troops necessary to pacify Darfur is often placed at 20,000 with only 5,000 elite western troops necessary to do the "heavy lifting", as the New Republic puts it.

These numbers may be wild underestimates. What if Khartoum attacked the Christian south again, confronting Nato – much as Slobodan Milosevic did when he began razing Kosovar villages after air attacks – with a choice between exposure of its hypocrisy or a massive commitment of ground troops?

The lesson of Iraq, argues Caldwell, is that "there is no such thing as a humanitarian invasion." He’s not even convinced that what’s going on in Sudan really amounts to genocide in the true sense of the word. I’m not qualified to judge, but I’m eager to see what the pro-intervention response will be.

Tomorrow, I’m taking my annual two weeks’ Christmas break from the usual pace of blogging. I’ll be posting once a day, though, including a round-up of the years’ contests. In the next fortnight (I’m getting into a British mood), I’ll be unveiling this years winners of the various awards this site hands out, and the final results of our ’80s Music Video contest.

Meanwhile, three Brit-bloggers are going to highjack the Dish’s Christmas season: Alex Massie, Clive Davis and Danny Finkelstein. Alex writes for the Daily Telegraph, the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and various other newspapers. He grew up in the Scottish Borders, attended university in Dublin, Ireland and currently lives in Washington. He’ll be blogging in part from Scotland over the holidays. In London, Clive Davis (not the music mogul) is an arts and op-ed contributor to the Times of London, a columnist for the Washington Times, past Hoover Institution media fellow, and the writer-presenter of Radio 4 documentaries on Richard Wright and William L. Shirer. Danny Finkelstein is author of Comment Central, a weekly Times of London columnist and soccer statistician. He’s been an adviser to both a Conservative Prime Minister and a leader of the Opposition. His hobbies – all Englishman must have some – are reading, collecting American political memorabilia and not gardening. He gives great lunch.

It should be a fun couple of weeks. Treat our guest-bloggers with a little more tact than you do me, but feel free to email them the usual way (they’ve been given the passcode to the email in-tray). I’ll also be posting some of my personal favorite window views from 2006.

Thanks for a great year. Traffic doubled from January to November; YouTube gave us a whole new medium to play with; and the always-risky marriage of an independent blog with a big media company went off with nary a hitch. I want to thank the good guys at Time for being so supportive and hands-off. I have no idea what next year will bring, but I’m just glad I spent much of the past year among the readers of this blog. Thanks for putting up with me, for supporting, attacking and correcting me. Have a great Christmas and see you full time again on New Year’s Day.

(Painting of the Houses of Parliament by Claude Monet. More here.)

"Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense the nation has ever had," – vice-president Dick Cheney.

This proposal looks like it may emerge as the Bush-McCain strategy in Iraq: the double-down strategy aimed at restoring order, critically in Baghdad, before any political solution can be tried. It looks to me in the serious range – 50,000 more troops. If this is presented, and appears to be a real plan for one last attempt to salvage Iraq, I’d be inclined to support it, while remaining still doubtful of its chances for success. I wish it had been done two years ago. But the devil is in the details, and we probably won’t see more of them till the New Year. But at least, this plan seems to take the reality of the situation seriously, unlike every other one presented by this president for the past three and a half years. My mind is open.

A YouTube tribute:

A lovely reflection on its meaning from someone facing death. Money quote:

If ever there were an occasion to contemplate a single possibility, the deathbed would be it. And yet, at least right now, I am of two minds: I have (in the language of computers) a split screen. Because of the religious worlds I’ve traveled in, I foresee angels, archangels and all the company of heaven. Here are the saints in light, including (who knows?) a Grandma, a mother, a father and a Luis. There are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. Ten thousand times ten thousand gather before the divine throne. I think of the most solemn of Baroque high masses, with clouds of incense and all my favorite music.

But because I am a child of our age, with a deep suspicion of fantasy’s smokescreen, the other portion of my afterlife screen is a complete blank. Whether all black or all white doesn’t matter: there is absolutely nothing to behold. Lights out. It is finished.

All or nothing? Right now it is a toss up, but at my end I am sure to make some version of Pascal’s wager. In this essay, moreover, I want to go for broke and opt for a single scenario. It won’t be some amalgam of John’s Revelation and Dante’s Paradiso; nor will it be nothing. I’ll refrain from anticipating anything that can be seen whatsoever, except with the eyes of the heart. Instead, I’ll put my life and my death into a single spoken line, which is, in fact, as close as I can come to preparing for the great adventure.

For my part, I am absolutely convinced that there is a heaven. And I am just as convinced that I have no idea whatever what it will be like, and deep doubt that I will be worthy of it.

Prague, Czech Republic, 2 pm.